The gruelling siege dragging on at El Rodeo prison outside Caracas, where a few dozen heavily armed inmates are still holding out against national guards after almost three weeks, may for now have been eclipsed by the startling news that Venezuela’s president has cancer.But as Venezuelans gradually come to terms with the fact that Hugo Chávez could remain in Cuba for as long as six months, after emergency surgery there last month on a cancerous tumour, they are beginning to ask how the Opec country’s highly personalised government will operate in the interim.

“[Mr] Chávez is the man in charge around here,” says Yoana Castillo, the wife of one of the inmates being held hostage inside El Rodeo, who doesn’t even know if her husband is still alive. “Where is [Mr] Chávez when you need him?” she asks angrily, metres away from a human wall of national guards in riot gear outside the prison.

Pakistani mangos are attracting world liking including USA. It was some months ago, when US foreign secretary Hillary Clinton visited Pakistan where in Islamabad she was served with delicious mangos. She was so impressed after eating the mangos that she could not help saying that she never ever had such a marvelous taste in mangos anywhere in the world. She went on praising Pakistan summer fruit and expressed her deep desire that her people may also enjoy the taste.

It clearly means if we can export them to USA according to International processing standards, we can earn millions of dollars besides goodwill for other Pakistani fruits also. This can multiply export orders from USA and the foreign reserve as well.

Unfortunately, no license of Pakistani mangos could be acquired in USA since our independence. When Secretary Clinton hailed our fruits, her remarks ignited a want in US market to bring mangos from Pakistan. A vigilant Pakist…

The World's 18 Strangest Roadways: Gallery
The most direct path between two points is a straight line, but roads are rarely straight, and the ones that are can be terminally boring. Engineers around the world must calculate the most efficient routes over massive mountains, through densely populated cities and around unavoidable bodies of water, all while accounting for the ecological and financial cost of such projects. The results can be astonishing. Here are some of the world's most notable roads and why they stand out.

SEOUL, June 29 (Xinhua) -- South Korea's National Assembly on Wednesday ratified the free trade agreement (FTA) with Peru, paving the way for further economic cooperation between the two nations.

The ratification came after the National Assembly foreign affairs and trade committee approved it on Tuesday.

The two nations launched their talks about an FTA bill in March 2008, and entered official negotiations in early 2009. The trade deal was formally signed in March this year.

South Korea's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade hailed the approvement of the deal in a statement, saying it will contribute to promoting trades and investments and strengthening cooperation in resources development.

The deal, the second of its kind South Korea reached with a Latin American country, following the FTA with Chile signed in 2003, calls for the abolishment of all tariffs in trade within 10 years.

July 4 (Bloomberg) -- Richard Yetsenga, head of global foreign-exchange strategy at Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd., talks about Thailand's election and its implications for the local currency. Yetsenga also talks about the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand dollars. He speaks with John Dawson on Bloomberg Television's "First Up." (Source: Bloomberg)

July 4 (Bloomberg) -- Michael Montesano, a visiting research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asia Studies in Singapore, talks about Thailand's political future following the weekend elections. The party linked to exiled Thai leader Thaksin Shinawatra won a parliamentary majority, making it more difficult for his opponents to overturn the res…

"By today's standards, King George III was a very mild tyrant indeed. He taxed his American colonists at a rate of only pennies per annum. His actual impact on their personal lives was trivial. He had arbitrary power over them in law and in principle, but in fact it was seldom exercised. If you compare his rule with that of today's U.S. Government, you have to wonder why we celebrate our independence." - Joe Sobran

National Humanities Medal Winner Was the Author of 15 Books on Mexican and Latin American History

July 22, 2010

Ramón Eduardo Ruiz – professor emeritus of history at UC San Diego and a winner of the National Humanities Medal – died in his Rancho Santa Fe home on July 6. He was 88.

Honored by President Bill Clinton as “one of America’s premier and pioneering scholars of Latin American history,” Ruiz died after complications from a recent fall and a battle with cancer.

Ruiz, who taught at UCSD for more than two decades, was the author of 15 books, including landmark works on the Mexican and Cuban revolutions.

Born September 9, 1921, Ruiz was a native San Diegan and grew up in La Jolla, where his interest in Mexico was nurtured by his family. “My father was a militant nationalist,” Ruiz said in a 1998 interview with The Los Angeles Times. “He would talk about the heroes of Mexico, the food of Mexico, the character of Mexico and the folklore of Mexico. We wer…

THE Piper PA-31 Navajo took off into the sultry Miami morning and streaked southward toward the Caribbean. High over Haiti, the cameras inside began to snap.

Behind this reconnaissance mission was, of all things, a financial institution: the World Bank, symbol of globalization and, to many, the hubris of wealthy nations.

But this was hardly some clandestine operation. On the contrary, the aerial photographs taken that January morning in 2010, shortly after a powerful earthquake leveled much of Port-au-Prince, were soon uploaded to the Web for all to see, along with an invitation to help World Bank specialists assess the damage and figure out how to aid Haiti.

The appeal marked a radical departure for the often close-to-the-vest World Bank, which, like its brother, the International Moneta…